The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20151118224754/http://doubleclickadvertisers.blogspot.com/search/label/Programmatic

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Last week, the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) announced the “Verified by TAG” initiative to help increase transparency of digital advertising transactions across the industry. We’re fully supportive of both programs outlined in TAG’s announcement and we’re currently in the process of applying for TAG Registration. To support the adoption of Payment IDs across the ecosystem, starting today our version of Payment IDs is available in DoubleClick Ad Exchange to all buyers globally.

Currently, if a programmatic buyer finds they’ve bought fraudulent inventory, there is no way to directly identify the supply source responsible for the fraud. The Payment ID system we proposed to the TAG Anti-Fraud working group fixes this problem by asking all supply sources (e.g. ad exchanges, ad networks, supply side platforms) of advertising inventory to create and provide unique and persistent anonymous identifiers that link every impression to who is paid in their accounting systems. If a buyer finds invalid activity from any source in their supply chain, these Payment IDs will help the buyer to identify who is responsible and blacklist those suppliers from their campaigns.

We’ve always invested heavily to keep DoubleClick Ad Exchange free of invalid activity and ensure that money spent on our platform only goes to support legitimate publishers, app developers, and content creators. To show our commitment to a better ads ecosystem, accelerate the adoption of Payment IDs, and help DSPs start integrating them, we’ve implemented the standard as it exists today, and we’ll continue to work closely with TAG and others in the industry to formalize an industry-wide Payment ID program. When the TAG Anti-Fraud Working Group has finalized the broader industry standard, we’ll happily make any changes to ensure we are compliant with TAG’s efforts.

"Google has been at the forefront of the fight against digital ad fraud, and this announcement advances our work together to develop an industry-wide Payment ID system. We look forward to continued collaboration with Google and other programmatic leaders through the TAG Anti-Fraud Working Group to create a fully transparent digital ad supply chain that will expose the bad actors and cut off their financial support."
Mike Zaneis, CEO, TAG

Leading programmatic buyers, DoubleClick Bid Manager, Dstillery, Magnetic, MediaMath, Rocket Fuel, The Trade Desk, and Turn have all committed to integrating Payment IDs into their systems in the coming months.

Posted by:

Vegard Johnsen
Product Manager, Google Ads Traffic Quality
Chetna Bindra
Product Manager, DoubleClick Ad Exchange

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Mobile has forever changed the way we live, and it’s forever changed the way we engage with brands. It has fractured the consumer journey into hundreds of real-time, intent-driven micro-moments -- the moments in time when consumers' preferences are shaped and decisions are made. Each one is a critical opportunity for brands, and increasingly we are seeing advertisers turn to programmatic to reach and engage audiences everywhere and win these moments.

As the industry gears up for Advertising Week next week, I want to reflect on the momentum we’re seeing in programmatic buying across our platforms, especially in mobile. At DoubleClick, the number of advertisers using our programmatic solutions has grown nearly 2x in the last 18 months, and now includes over 80% of the AdAge top 100 advertisers. More broadly, IDC estimates that programmatic spending on mobile display and video advertising in the U.S. will grow from $4.7 billion in 2015 to $22.8 billion in 2019 (a CAGR of 65%.)1

With people switching between multiple devices throughout their day and increasing their consumption of mobile video, advertisers have changed how and where they buy programmatically in order to connect with people in micro-moments. Both mobile and video impressions served on DoubleClick Bid Manager have grown more than 3.5x since last year, and impressions served via direct deals that are transacted programmatically have nearly tripled. To provide you with the largest pool of inventory, DoubleClick Bid Manager has access to 70 exchanges and API partners, and we prioritize mobile and video inventory sources when identifying new integrations to pursue.

Ultimately, our engineers spend each day thinking about how to build innovative products that help you win these micro-moments by connecting with the people you want to reach, across screens and at scale. The growth in usage of our platforms shows that we are making progress, but we are even more excited for what's to come. Google has a great line-up of talks set for next week in New York - we hope to see you there.

Posted by Neal Mohan
VP, Display & Video Advertising, Google
1. IDC Report #256782, June 2015 “WW and US Programmatic growth forecasts, 2015-2019”

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Every day, your audience is filling their days with hundreds if not thousands of micro-moments—intent-rich moments when preferences are shaped and decisions are made. As consumers spread their attention across more and more screens and channels, those moments can happen almost anywhere, anytime. People search on their smartphones while in front of the TV. They watch YouTube videos on their tablets while texting their friends. They open a mobile app to shop for the perfect gift, then head to the store to buy it. With mobile devices never more than an arm’s length away, people can find and buy anything, anytime.

For marketers, this means the purchase funnel is wildly more complicated than it was just a few years ago.

“Brands can use programmatic to assemble a consumer’s micro-moments in just the right way—like joining puzzle pieces together—to see a detailed blueprint of consumer intent.”

It’s hard to plan for nonlinear purchase paths, but programmatic advertising can help, enabling brands to reach the right person with the right message in the moment of opportunity. Brands can use programmatic to assemble a consumer’s micro-moments in just the right way—like joining puzzle pieces together—to see a detailed blueprint of consumer intent. That’s a powerful proposition, and it’s why programmatic advertising spend is projected to grow by more than 77% this year.1

In this article, we share four tips for using programmatic to win these micro-moments and examples of brands that are doing it right.

Visit DoubleClick.com to read the full article.

Posted by Kelly Cox
Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

1. IDC, Worldwide Programmatic Display Forecast, 2015.

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While global sales of L'Oréal Luxe makeup brand Shu Uemura were booming, reaching its target audience across North America proved challenging. By collaborating with Karl Lagerfeld (and his cat, Choupette) and using DoubleClick Bid Manager and Google Analytics Premium, the campaign delivered nearly double the anticipated revenue.
Goals
  • Re-introduce and raise awareness of the Shu Uemura cosmetics brand in North America
  • Drive North American sales of Karl Lagerfeld’s Shupette collection for Shu Uemura
  • Grow the Shu Uemura email subscriber list
  • Approach
  • Organized website audiences with Google Analytics Premium
  • Used programmatic buying to lead prospects down the path to purchase
  • Leveraged a range of audience data in DoubleClick Bid Manager to buy paid media in display and social channels
  • Results
  • Drove almost 2X the anticipated revenue
  • Exceeded CPA targets and achieved a 2,200% return on ad spend (ROAS)
  • Increased web traffic and email subscriber
  • To learn more about Shu Uemura’s approach, check out the full case study.

    Posted by Kelly Cox
    Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

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    Today the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) announced a new pilot blacklist to protect advertisers across the industry. This blacklist comprises data-center IP addresses associated with non-human ad requests. We're happy to support this effort along with other industry leaders—Dstillery, Facebook, MediaMath, Quantcast, Rubicon Project, The Trade Desk, TubeMogul and Yahoo—and contribute our own data-center blacklist. As mentioned to Ad Age and in our recent call to action, we believe that if we work together we can raise the fraud-fighting bar for the whole industry.

    Data-center traffic is one of many types of non-human or illegitimate ad traffic. The newly shared blacklist identifies web robots or “bots” that are being run in data centers but that avoid detection by the IAB/ABC International Spiders & Bots List. Well-behaved bots announce that they're bots as they surf the web by including a bot identifier in their declared User-Agent strings. The bots filtered by this new blacklist are different. They masquerade as human visitors by using User-Agent strings that are indistinguishable from those of typical web browsers.

    In this post, we take a closer look at a few examples of data-center traffic to show why it’s so important to filter this traffic across the industry.

    Impact of the data-center blacklist

    When observing the traffic generated by the IP addresses in the newly shared blacklist, we found significantly distorted click metrics. In May of 2015 on DoubleClick Campaign Manager alone, we found the blacklist filtered 8.9% of all clicks. Without filtering these clicks from campaign metrics, advertiser click-through rates would have been incorrect and for some advertisers this error would have been very large.

    Below is a plot that shows how much click-through rates in May would have been inflated across the most impacted of DoubleClick Campaign Manager’s larger advertisers.

    Two examples of bad data-center traffic

    There are two distinct types of invalid data-center traffic: where the intent is malicious and where the impact on advertisers is accidental. In this section we consider two interesting examples where we’ve observed traffic that was likely generated with malicious intent.

    Publishers use many different strategies to increase the traffic to their sites. Unfortunately, some are willing to use any means necessary to do so. In our investigations we’ve seen instances where publishers have been running software tools in data centers to intentionally mislead advertisers with fake impressions and fake clicks.

    First example

    UrlSpirit is just one example of software that some unscrupulous publishers have been using to collaboratively drive automated traffic to their websites. Participating publishers install the UrlSpirit application on Windows machines and they each submit up to three URLs through the application’s interface. Submitted URLs are then distributed to other installed instances of the application, where Internet Explorer is used to automatically visit the list of target URLs. Publishers who have not installed the application can also leverage the network of installations by paying a fee.

    At the end of May more than 82% of the UrlSpirit installations were being run on machines in data centers. There were more than 6,500 data-center installations of UrlSpirit, with each data-center installation running in a separate virtual machine. In aggregate, the data-center installations of UrlSpirit were generating a monthly rate of at least half a billion ad requests— an average of 2,500 fraudulent ad requests per installation per day.

    Second Example

    HitLeap is another example of software that some publishers are using to collaboratively drive automated traffic to their websites. The software also runs on Windows machines, and each instance uses the Chromium Embedded Framework to automatically browse the websites of participating publishers—rather than using Internet Explorer.

    Before publishers can use the network of installations to drive traffic to their websites, they need browsing minutes. Participating publishers earn browsing minutes by running the application on their computers. Alternatively, they can simply buy browsing minutes—with bundles starting at $9 for 10,000 minutes or up to 1,000,000 minutes for $625. 

    Publishers can specify as many target URLs as they like. The number of visits they receive from the network of installations is a function of how long they want the network of bots to spend on their sites. For example, ten browsing minutes will get a publisher five visits if the publisher requests two-minute visit durations.

    In mid-June, at least 4,800 HitLeap installations were being run in virtual machines in data centers, with a unique IP associated with each HitLeap installation. The data-center installations of HitLeap made up 16% of the total HitLeap network, which was substantially larger than the UrlSpirit network.

    In aggregate the data-center installations of HitLeap were generating a monthly rate of at least a billion fraudulent ad requests—or an average of 1,600 ad requests per installation per day.

    Not only were these publishers collectively responsible for billions of automated ad requests, but their websites were also often extremely deceptive. For example, of the top ten webpages visited by HitLeap bots in June, nine of these included hidden ad slots -- meaning that not only was the traffic fake, but the ads couldn’t have been seen even if they had been legitimate human visitors. 

    http://vedgre.com/7/gg.html is illustrative of these nine webpages with hidden ad slots. The webpage has no visible content other than a single 300×250px ad. This visible ad is actually in a 300×250px iframe that includes two ads, the second of which is hidden. Additionally, there are also twenty-seven 0×0px hidden iframes on this page with each hidden iframe including two ad slots. In total there are fifty-five hidden ads on this page and one visible ad. Finally, the ads served on http://vedgre.com/7/gg.html appear to advertisers as though they have been served on legitimate websites like indiatimes.com, scotsman.com, autotrader.co.uk, allrecipes.com, dictionary.com and nypost.com, because the tags used on http://vedgre.com/7/gg.html to request the ad creatives have been deliberately spoofed.

    An example of collateral damage

    Unlike the traffic described above, there is also automated data-center traffic that impacts advertising campaigns but that hasn’t been generated for malicious purposes. An interesting example of this is an advertising competitive intelligence company that is generating a large volume of undeclared non-human traffic.

    This company uses bots to scrape the web to find out which ad creatives are being served on which websites and at what scale. The company’s scrapers also click ad creatives to analyze the landing page destinations. To provide its clients with the most accurate possible intelligence, this company’s scrapers operate at extraordinary scale and they also do so without including bot identifiers in their User-Agent strings.

    While the aim of this company is not to cause advertisers to pay for fake traffic, the company’s scrapers do waste advertiser spend. They not only generate non-human impressions; they also distort the metrics that advertisers use to evaluate campaign performance—in particular, click metrics. Looking at the data across DoubleClick Campaign Manager this company’s scrapers were responsible for 65% of the automated data-center clicks recorded in the month of May.

    Going forward

    Google has always invested to prevent this and other types of invalid traffic from entering our ad platforms. By contributing our data-center blacklist to TAG, we hope to help others in the industry protect themselves. 

    We’re excited by the collaborative spirit we’ve seen working with other industry leaders on this initiative. This is an important, early step toward tackling fraudulent and illegitimate inventory across the industry and we look forward to sharing more in the future. By pooling our collective efforts and working with industry bodies, we can create strong defenses against those looking to take advantage of our ecosystem. We look forward to working with the TAG Anti-fraud working group to turn this pilot program into an industry-wide tool.

    Posted by Vegard Johnsen, Product Manager Google Ad Traffic Quality

    Posted:
    Last week at the DoubleClick Leadership Summit, we announced the availability of Native Ads for Apps on our DoubleClick platforms. In this post, we’ll dive into the details of this new ad format and what it means for our clients.

    The mobile revolution has changed the way we engage with content. We check our phones literally hundreds of times a day: to catch up with friends and family, read an article, or watch a video while waiting in line. In these moments, we believe ads have the best chance to be effective when they are placed with respect to a user’s context.

    At Google, helping advertisers connect with the right audience in the right moments has been our aim from the beginning. From search ads complementing Google search results to TrueView ads on YouTube, we’ve found that the less disruptive we can make ads, the more open consumers are to them. That’s why we’re adding access to YouTube’s TrueView format and Twitter’s Promoted Tweets on DoubleClick Bid Manager, our programmatic platform. And now, we’re excited to help advertisers connect with publishers to bring rich native ad experiences to apps with our native ads solution in DoubleClick. 

    Introducing Native Ads on DoubleClick
    Native ads fit in with the look and feel of publisher content, enabling better, more effective ad experiences for users. Context is incredibly important on mobile, and that’s why over the next few weeks we’re rolling out our native ad solution for apps to DoubleClick for Publishers clients globally.
    Native ads for apps in DFP provides publishers with the full flexibility needed to create seamless ad experiences for their users. Instead of serving a static banner ad, DFP delivers ad components (headline, image, links, etc) to a publisher’s app where they’re rendered into a native ad. By providing the building blocks of an ad, our native solution allows an advertiser to work with their DFP partners to create ads that are seamless with content, can take advantage of mobile features like swipe gestures and 3D animation, and can be adjusted to create beautiful ads for any device or screen size. 

    Setting up native ads for apps with your DFP partners will be easy. Publishers that enable native ads will be able to offer two of the most popular mobile formats, app install ads or content ads, or create fully custom native ads by including any additional fields for DFP to send to their app.

    Of course, it’s essential that native ads are clearly marked as advertising. Ads that trick users into clicking or are indistinguishable from content are bad for the whole ecosystem including users, advertisers, and publishers.

    Native experiences are essential on mobile
    When users pick up their phones it’s critical that they’re presented with a seamless ad experience. With native ads in DFP, publishers can maintain a beautiful user experience in their apps while providing brands an opportunity to reach their audience on mobile. Advertisers should reach out to their publisher partners to find out how they can use native ads to connect with their customers and reach them when they’re most receptive.

    If you want to learn more about native ads in DoubleClick reach out to your account manager today. Also, visit the mobile solutions section of our website to see how DoubleClick can help you engage your audience on every screen. 

    Posted by Josh Cohen, Senior Product Manager 

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    Last week at the DoubleClick Leadership Summit we announced several innovations designed to help advertisers and publishers thrive in a moments-driven world. In order to capture these moments, marketers are increasingly turning to programmatic buying to deliver the right experience to the right consumer, in real-time. We are pleased to share more details on two of the programmatic buying innovations we announced last week: Programmatic Guaranteed and Marketplace in DoubleClick Bid Manager.

    New Frontiers for Media Buying
    Programmatic buying might be better known for helping marketers streamline the ad buying process with auction based buying but it certainly has evolved beyond these confines. As marketers continue to strive to get the content and the context right, programmatic direct has emerged as a way for brands to combine the efficiency of programmatic with traditional direct-to-publisher buys. The popularity of programmatic direct deals will continue to increase with eMarketer estimating that programmatic direct will account for 42% of digital display ads by 2016. In fact, over the last year across Google systems we’ve seen 2X YOY programmatic direct growth across desktop display and 3X YOY growth across mobile.

    But to date programmatic direct deals haven’t included the reservation buys that make up a majority of marketers’ spend. Reservations are largely made in time-consuming, offline negotiations that can take up to 40 steps to complete. Advertisers not only find it difficult to optimize across different media buys but reservation buys also don’t allow marketers to set frequency caps to control for the saturation of ads to a viewer across programmatic and reservation media - resulting in a bad user experience and wasteful spending.

    Introducing: Programmatic Guaranteed
    Programmatic Guaranteed is a new deal type that allows advertisers to access guaranteed inventory on higher impact formats such as video and mobile rich media with programmatic targeting and frequency capping across all digital media. Marketers will be able to save media dollars by minimizing wasted impressions on users already reached, instead optimizing that budget to reach new users across all their buys. It is also possible to apply remarketing lists to reservation deals using first and third party data and to truly serve the right creative at the right time by reaching users based on where they are in the marketing funnel and not based on media type. We are currently piloting Programmatic Guaranteed, globally, and several clients are seeing great results.

    "Programmatic Guaranteed is proving to be a powerful tool to drive full efficiency in the media buying process. In particular, it offers the opportunity to control each component of the media plan, at the same time, in a synergistic and systematic way. Programmatic Guaranteed represents a key application in relieving digital media planning from the time-consuming management process. Partnering with Google has allowed Amnet to test this cutting-edge solution and serve as an innovator and trend-setter in this space." -Massimo Fontana, Head of Amnet IT
    "We see Programmatic Guaranteed as another important step to connect advertisers with premium publishers’ inventory. Google’s technology helps automate the buying and selling of premium inventory, which is important to ensure that we can deliver the best experience for our advertising and publisher partners”. -Darby Sieben, President of Mediative, a Yellow Pages Digital & Media Solutions Limited Division
    Introducing: Marketplace in DoubleClick Bid Manager
    Even with all of this functionality, discovering the right kind of publishers and inventory can be cumbersome and difficult to scale. Marketers should be able manage all of these deal types simply and easily. That is why last week we were excited to announce the global alpha launch of Marketplace in DoubleClick Bid Manager -- a shoppable storefront that will empower marketers to discover, negotiate and manage all their inventory from a single place. Advertisers will have greater visibility into publisher offerings, giving them a richer, more detailed discovery experience for all deal types, including Programmatic Guaranteed. Marketplace in DoubleClick Bid Manager is currently in Alpha and will be more generally available by end of year.

    Innovating for the future
    If digital is the future of media then programmatic is the future of digital. Brands no longer have to decide ahead of time where their message will get the best response. With these new innovations in programmatic, ads can fluidly reach each person in their audience at the best time, place and channel for that person - regardless of how the deal was signed.

    We’re excited about the future of programmatic buying and selling and the possibilities it will bring for all of our partners. If you’re interested in learning more about Marketplace in DoubleClick Bid Manager or Programmatic Guaranteed reach out to your account manager today, and stay tuned as we look to expand our pilots to more buyers.

    This is the second announcement in our post-DLS series. Join us over the next week as we release more details of all our recent product announcements. Next up, Native Ads in DoubleClick.

    Posted by:
    • Roshan Khan, Product Manager, DoubleClick 
    • Steve Suppe, Product Manager, DoubleClick 
    • Kelly Cox, Product Marketing, DoubleClick

    Posted:
    Cross posted on Inside AdWords Blog

    With over 30 million songs, Google Play Music provides access to the music people want. And today, we’re launching a free, ad-supported version so even more people can enjoy music that makes whatever they’re doing better.

    At any moment in the day, Google Play Music has music for what people are doing – whether they’re working, working out, or working it on the dance floor – offering curated radio stations that deliver the right song at the right time. Our team of music experts, including the folks who created Songza, crafts each station song by song so listeners can just enjoy the music, effortlessly.

    This new ad-supported version is great for advertisers interested in connecting with consumers through premium content and delightful mobile experiences. This Google Play Ads inventory is available through DoubleClick Bid Manager and the Google Display Network (GDN), which gives advertisers access to engaging and beautiful ad units such as TrueView video ads and Lightbox ads – all mobile-optimized, seamless across screens, and simple to set up. Plus, advertisers can take advantage of all GDN’s targeting options to promote their product or service to the right people – including keywords, affinity audiences, remarketing and demo targeting.

    Many advertisers are already investing in this new music inventory, including the media agency Omnicom. Steve Katelman, EVP of Global Strategic Partnerships at Omnicom shared that: “We want to reach customers where they're spending the most time, so music is a critical part of our media mix. As a launch partner for Google Play Music, Omnicom Media Group can offer our clients an invaluable head start in delivering engaging, high-impact brand messages on mobile and the web to music-loving consumers.”

    To get started with ads on Google Play Music, set up your campaign in AdWords or DoubleClick Bid Manager today.

    Posted by Elias Roman, Product Manager, Google Play Music

    Posted:
    Laura Desmond, Global CEO at Starcom Mediavest Group, will be keynoting the live stream from the DoubleClick Leadership Summit on June 17th. We caught up with Laura for a quick glimpse of what she’ll be speaking to and what owning the moment means to her. 

    Register now to hear her live on June 17 at 9AM ET.

    The rate of change is only accelerating, driven by rapid technology advancements and evolving consumer behaviors. FOMO isn’t just for millennials anymore—it’s a pressure our industry feels everyday.

    Brands need to shift from mass-market strategies to precision ones that deliver relevancy along with immediacy. Core to delivering is keeping the consumer at the center, understanding them deeply, and delivering experiences that match their pace and purpose. 

    Owning the moment requires more than just being “real-time.” Winning now depends on the ability to mix velocity and relevancy, drawing upon data, unification, personalization and agility. 

    On Wednesday, I’ll be sharing how against a backdrop of great change, brands can drive impact with velocity marketing. Today’s best marketers are much like the hottest EDM mix artists -- leveraging technology, data, and collaboration to own the moment, deliver relevancy, and spur action. 

    Register now to hear more from Laura on Wednesday, June 17th at 9AM ET.

    Guest post by Laura Desmond, Global Chief Executive Officer, Starcom Mediavest Group

    Posted:
    Cross-posted on the Google Analytics blog

    Modern marketers live in a world that’s dominated by data. Advancements in programmatic buying enable marketers to leverage data and analytics to connect precisely, in real time. Advertisers who are smart about organizing, segmenting, and acting on this data are realizing the benefits of more personalized marketing. BT, a leading telecommunications firm in the UK, did just that and saw fantastic results.

    BT wanted to increase the relevance of their remarketing campaigns by creating more precise audience lists. With the help of their media agency Maxus, BT found that using Google Analytics Premium with DoubleClick Bid Manager offered the ideal solution.


    Google Analytics Premium gave BT the ability to create granular audience segments based on site behavior metrics such as recency, frequency, referral source, and stage of cart abandonment. Once these audience lists were created, the native integration between Google Analytics Premium and DoubleClick Bid Manager meant they could be shared with the platform to make more precise media buys in just a few clicks.


    Using Google Analytics Premium with DoubleClick Bid Manager put Maxus and BT in the driver’s seat of their media campaigns. They not only gleaned full transparency with a single customer view and de-duplicated metrics across all channels, but also saw better measurement through unified reporting, and the ability to optimize based on the results.

    Flashcard_13-v2B-02.png
    "Our goals were to build up ‘best practices’ of programmatic display remarketing techniques with a focus on driving post-click sales,” says Alison Thorburn, Head of Digital DR Media at BT. “The DoubleClick suite of products enabled us to do this quickly and efficiently as audience data can be easily organized and utilized.”

    The new analytics-driven approach produced a 69% increase in post-click sales and an 87% reduction in post-click cost per acquisition compared to the previous year’s remarketing activity. It also compared favorably to the remarketing activity that ran simultaneously outside of DoubleClick Bid Manager; post-click sales were 30% higher and post-click cost per acquisition was 42% lower. BT has now consolidated its display remarketing through DoubleClick BidManager.


    Read the full case study here.


    Posted by-
    Kelley Sternhagen, Product Marketing, Google Analytics
    Kelly Cox, Product Marketing, DoubleClick


    Posted:
    The abundance of choices consumers have today means people are consuming content in more places and actively tuning out what’s not relevant in the moment. In this environment, programmatic buying is redefining how marketers can connect with consumers in all the moments that matter. And to take advantage of its benefits, advertisers are adopting programmatic at dramatic rates. In fact, eMarketer predicts that 83% of all display buys will be bought programmatically by 2017.

    However, achieving the promise of programmatic is not a guarantee. It takes partnering with the right platform to effectively craft, execute, and manage a programmatic strategy. But with so many options, how should advertisers choose the right platform to reach their unique goals today, and in the future with programmatic buying?

    To help marketers better understand what to look for when Choosing a Programmatic Buying Partner, we uncover the five areas of expertise to look for in a potential platform.

    This buyer’s guide will help marketers define and prioritize selection criteria for a programmatic buying platform that’s the right fit for your short- and long-term goals. Download the whitepaper here.


    You can stay on top of new updates by subscribing to our newsletter and following us on Google+ and Twitter.


    Posted by -

    Kelly Cox, Product Marketing, DoubleClick

    Posted:
    A lot of ink has recently poured onto the subject of digital advertising fraud—which is a great thing. Fraud is a real and serious problem, but some, we think, still hold a mental image of fraudsters as one-off bad actors sitting in a dark room racking up clicks on ads on their site to make a few extra bucks. The truth is far more troubling: the majority of ad fraud today is perpetrated by sophisticated organizations that devote vast resources to build and operate large scale botnets run on hijacked devices, to reap multi-million dollar payouts [1,2].

    Stopping these bad actors requires an industry-wide, long term commitment to identifying and filtering fake traffic from the ecosystem. This is not a task any one company can take on alone. We need everyone across the industry to take steps toward making digital advertising more secure and transparent. Here are some actions we’re taking to help move the entire industry forward. (We hope others join us.)

    Describing threats in common, precise language
    Many of the statistics and headline-grabbing disclosures in the market today do a great job of creating panic, but share very little detail to help anyone actually solve the problem.

    Imagine if police officers looking for a bank robber could only describe the criminal as “suspicious”. The robber would be free for life. And yet this is disappointingly how advertising fraud is policed today. “Fraud” and “suspicious” are seen as synonymous and applied to everything from completely legitimate ad impressions to fake traffic generated by zombie PCs infected with malware. Before we can stop advertising fraud, everyone needs to start using common, precise language to disclose fraudulent activity.

    The IAB introduced its Anti-Fraud Principles and Proposed Taxonomy last September providing the industry with this common language and we strongly support these standards. But these are early steps – as an industry we can’t stop there. When fraud is identified it should be shared in a clear structured threat disclosure, mirroring how security researchers release security vulnerabilities. By increasing the amount of data we share in a transparent, helpful way, others in the industry will be able to corroborate any claims being made, remove the threat from their systems, removing it from the ecosystem. Further, if a public disclosure could lead to further damage, then vulnerable parties should be notified in advance.

    Ensuring bad actors can't hide: Supplier Identifiers
    If you bought a designer scarf in a store only to find out it’s a knock-off with a fake label, you’d expect a refund. You’d also know which store to avoid in the future. The same should hold true for fraudulent inventory. When fraud is identified, it should also be possible to identify the seller or reseller who should take responsibility for the inventory. 

    Today this doesn’t hold true. As an illustration of the problem, we are currently finding significant volumes of inventory misrepresenting where the ads will actually appear and in many instances there is no reliable and verifiable mechanism to identify who in the supply chain is responsible for this misrepresented inventory.
    To address this problem, we propose that the buyer of any branded (non-blind) impression should be passed a chain of unique supplier identifiers, one for each and every reseller (exchange, network, sell-side platform) and one for the publisher. With this full chain of identifiers for each impression, buyers can establish which supply paths for inventory can be trusted and which cannot. If a buyer finds a potential issue, and it’s clear where the problem lies in the supply path, then there should be an unambiguous process for refunds. It will also be easy to avoid this supply path in the future.

    Ultimately the burden for ensuring the quality of online inventory starts with those who sell it. To this end, we submitted a proposal to create an industry managed supplier identifier to the IAB Anti-Fraud Working Group in February, and we’ve heard others in the industry support this call for more transparency. We've come to take this type of guarantee for granted when we shop in a store – let's work together and make it a standard for digital advertising as well.

    Cleaning up campaign metrics
    Before investing your hard-earned money in a local business, you’d definitely review their financial reports to understand if it’s a good investment or not. In digital, campaign metrics are the record of truth. They help advertisers evaluate which inventory sources provide the greatest value and outline a roadmap of where ad spend should be invested. But if these metrics are polluted with fake and fraudulent activity, it’s impossible to know which inventory sources provide the best return on spend.

    Now, imagine if you invested in that small business only to find out it was actually a fictional front created by an organized crime ring, complete with receipts and a cashier, to cover up their back office money laundering operation. Fraudsters work hard to disguise their bot traffic as being human by having them do things like go window shopping or plan a vacation to create a whole world of made-up conversions and interactions before directing them to their final destination.

    As long as fake traffic still appears to be delivering value, advertisers’ spend will continue flowing to the operators of fake traffic sources. Of course our industry should push for 100% fraud free ecosystem. The reality, though, is that some will likely always slip through. When it does, it's also our responsibility to keep it from skewing marketers' metrics. If we can keep reporting systems from giving credit to fake traffic, this removes the incentive for publishers to buy this bad traffic from bad actors.

    As an industry, we owe it to our clients and ourselves to ensure that metrics are clean and accurate. Let’s work together to identify fraudulent traffic and invest in systems to filter it out of campaign metrics. 

    A fraud-free ecosystem?
    Advertising fraud is a real and serious problem, one that creates significant costs for advertisers, takes revenue from legitimate publishers, and enables the spread of malware to users, among other harms. To eliminate it, we must take action to remove the incentive for bad actors to create and sell fraudulent traffic. The steps I’ve outlined above seek to do this by cutting off their access to advertising spend and making it difficult for fraudsters to hide.

    Over the coming months, we’ll be taking these steps and working with the industry to help others clean bad traffic from the ecosystem. 

    Posted by Vegard Johnsen, Product Manager Google Ad Traffic Quality

    Posted:
    If an ad isn’t seen, it doesn’t have an impact, change perception, or build brand trust. That is why measuring the viewability of advertising matters. It gives marketers a clear understanding of campaign and messaging effectiveness and allows advertising spend to be allocated to the media where it will have the most impact.

    We have long been advocates of viewability as a currency between buyers and sellers, which is why we’ve had viewable-only buying on our network for more than a year and have been investing in our Active View technology.

    As a continuation of that effort, today we are releasing new Active View data from across our Google, DoubleClick and YouTube video ad platforms. This new research on the 5 factors of video viewability is being published today on Think with Google to start the discussion about the state of video ad viewability.


    In this research we found that only 54% of all video ads served across the web, excluding YouTube, had a chance to be seen! On YouTube 91% of ads were found to be viewable.


    As advertisers shift to paying for viewable video ads, rather than served impressions, understanding the drivers of viewability for video ads is more important than ever.

    To learn what viewability is and how it is measured, visit our new interactive Active View demo here.

    -
    Sanaz Ahari, Group Product Manager, Brand Measurement
    Michael Giordano, Product Marketing, Brand Measurement
    Anish Kattukaran, Product Marketing, Video & Brand Measurement


    Posted:
    DoubleClick Digital Marketing has always been an open platform to give marketers a more complete picture of how their digital marketing works together - across mobile and desktop, video and native. As the use of mobile devices continues to shape the consumer journey, we’re particularly focused on helping our partners make the most of in-app formats. In fact we’ve seen the volume of this type of inventory in DoubleClick Bid Manager (our programmatic buying platform) increase fivefold over the past year.

    Today we’re continuing this effort with a new partnership with Twitter. Through this partnership, DoubleClick clients will be able to buy Twitter’s Promoted Tweet ad format via DoubleClick Bid Manager across mobile (including in-app) and desktop. We will also make it easier for marketers to measure their Twitter ad campaigns directly within the DoubleClick platform.

    This deal complements our ongoing push to bring new formats and inventory to DoubleClick, like our recent announcement about YouTube’s TrueView format. We’re excited about this partnership and look forward to continuing to help our clients make the most of digital advertising in a multi-screen world.

    Posted by Payam Shodjai, Group Product Manager, DoubleClick Digital Marketing

    Posted:
    Since 2008 we’ve been working to make sure all of our services use strong HTTPS encryption by default. That means people using products like Search, Gmail, YouTube, and Drive will automatically have an encrypted connection to Google. In addition to providing a secure connection on our own products, we’ve been big proponents of the idea of “HTTPS Everywhere,” encouraging webmasters to prevent and fix security breaches on their sites, and using HTTPS as a signal in our search ranking algorithm.

    This year, we’re working to bring this “HTTPS Everywhere” mission to our ads products as well, to support all of our advertiser and publisher partners. Here are some of the specific initiatives we’re working on:
    • We’ve moved all YouTube ads to HTTPS as of the end of 2014.
    • Search on Google.com is already encrypted for a vast majority of users and we are working towards encrypting search ads across our systems. 
    • By June 30, 2015, the vast majority of mobile, video, and desktop display ads served to the Google Display Network, AdMob, and DoubleClick publishers will be encrypted.
    • Also by June 30, 2015, advertisers using any of our buying platforms, including AdWords and DoubleClick, will be able to serve HTTPS-encrypted display ads to all HTTPS-enabled inventory. 

    Of course we’re not alone in this goal. By encrypting ads, the advertising industry can help make the internet a little safer for all users. Recently, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) published a call to action to adopt HTTPS ads, and many industry players are also working to meet HTTPS requirements. We’re big supporters of these industry-wide efforts to make HTTPS everywhere a reality.

    Our HTTPS Everywhere ads initiatives will join some of our other efforts to provide a great ads experience online for our users, like “Why this Ad?”, “Mute This Ad” and TrueView skippable ads. With these security changes to our ads systems, we’re one step closer to ensuring users everywhere are safe and secure every time they choose to watch a video, map out a trip in a new city, or open their favorite app.

    Neal Mohan, VP Product Management, Display and Video Ads
    Jerry Dischler, VP Product Management, AdWords


    Posted:
    Today at Programmatic I/O in San Francisco, we are announcing our latest investment to help brands make the most of digital: the TrueView ad format will be available for programmatic buying within DoubleClick Bid Manager.

    This launch brings together two important trends we’re seeing: the importance of user choice in advertising and the ability to reach the right person at the right time with programmatic buying.

    We introduced TrueView, an innovative cost-per-view (CPV) ad format, five years ago as a way to put user choice at the heart of brand advertising. With TrueView, viewers choose to engage, and brands only pay when they do. Today, the format is a brand mainstay, representing 85% of all in-stream ads on YouTube. And based on a recent study, we’ve seen that two-thirds of TrueView campaigns deliver significant lift in brand interest.

    In parallel, programmatic buying has evolved from just a real-time bidding tool for direct response campaigns to an important technology and data-driven solution for brand building. Across our own platforms, we’ve seen the volume of programmatic transactions double year-over-year. With the consumer journey now fractured into many "micro-moments" across screens, programmatic can help brands understand and reach their audiences across devices and formats.

    In the coming months, marketers and agencies will be able to buy the TrueView choice-based video ad format on a cost-per-view (CPV) basis through DoubleClick Bid Manager. This is the first time TrueView has been available outside of AdWords, allowing DoubleClick clients to take advantage of features like cross-campaign frequency capping, unified audience insights, measurement and billing across campaigns.

    Some of our partners are already seeing success:


    "At Netflix, we have always embraced consumer choice. In the advertising world, TrueView is the epitome of that choice. The fact that we can now scale it further via DoubleClick Bid Manager represents a powerful new channel for marketing our content across the world." 
    Mike Zeman, Director of Digital Marketing, Netflix




    “TrueView has empowered us to give our consumers greater choice while delivering a better engaging viewer experience. As an early adopter of the TrueView beta in DoubleClick Bid Manager in the UK we have seen great success in achieving our CPV goals.” 
    Nestlé UK



    “We’re really excited to bring TrueView on DoubleClick Bid Manager into our video campaign arsenal. This deepens our ability to achieve client success metrics on highly relevant and viewable video inventory combined with universal controls around targeting, frequency management and reporting.” 
    Ian Johnson, EVP and MD, Global Product at Cadreon




    “TrueView in DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM) allows us to strengthen our branding offering while benefiting from significant efficiency gains. Once we can leverage DBM’s capabilities such as 3rd party audience targeting and universal frequency capping, we will have a very powerful value proposition for advertisers.” 
    Ali Nehme, Managing Director Digital, Vivaki Middle East and North Africa


    This adds to our ongoing investments to help brands get the most out of the programmatic landscape like Google Partner Select, Active View, Verification and brand safety protections. We're committed to providing the most complete programmatic platform to our brand partners to help them connect with their audiences in all the moments that matter. Stay tuned for even more in the months to come.

    -
    Neal Mohan, Vice President of Display and Video Advertising Products


    Posted:
    Cross posted from our DoubleClick for Publishers blog.

    It's an exciting time for broadcasters. With the proliferation of streaming video, OTT devices, connected TVs and mobile devices, the line between offline and digital video is quickly blurring. Navigating this change, though, is tricky--broadcasters are now facing the challenge of how to manage an ads business that spans multiple devices and multiple ways of consuming content. We’ve been working on a few initiatives to help broadcasters with this challenge, I had the pleasure of introducing a few of these at the NAB Show this morning.

    Better TV forecasting in DoubleClick for Publishers
    One of the biggest challenges broadcasters face in this new landscape is accurately being able to forecast their inventory for their shows. What was once a fairly straightforward process--estimating how many ads they could show during a given program though one delivery method on one screen--now looks like a logic puzzle on steroids. 

    Broadcasters now need to take into account the unpredictable nature of viewing habits on multiple screens, seasonality, spikes and fluctuations in traffic (e.g. for NCAA finals), different devices, ad loads, not to mention all of the new data that is available with digital.  How do you even begin to tell an advertiser that you can deliver on their campaign goals if the math is just this complicated? And especially as broadcasters plan for the upfronts?

    To help them meet this challenge, we're introducing new ways for broadcasters to forecast in DoubleClick for Publishers by enabling them to forecast available internet TV inventory with greater precision and insights and the impact from patterns in commercial breaks. And coming soon, broadcasters will be able to use seasonality in forecasting for upfront cycles and model based on their offline data. Our goal with these changes is to make it easier for our broadcast partners to manage this process and put together great inventory packages for their upfront offerings.

    mDialog inventory comes to the DoubleClick Ad Exchange
    Last year, we acquired a company called mDialog with expertise in dynamically delivering ads to internet-delivered TV content (like streaming video, OTT devices and connected TVs). We’ve been working to bring their technology together with ours. Thanks to this work, we’ve now connected mDialog inventory to the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. This means that TV providers will be able to monetize TV inventory across OTT devices (like Chromecast, Apple TV, Roku, Amazon Fire TB), across all screens, programmatically. 

    Partners like Fox News are already seeing success with this new feature:

    'With more and more of our viewers consuming content across screens, digital video is, of course, a huge focus. Google bringing the mDialog technology to the DoubleClick Ad Exchange has allowed us to connect our Internet-delivered television content, whether live programming or full-episode shows with the controls we need to programmatic demand. This is a great step forward both towards being able to better monetize this cross-screen content and providing a great ads experience for viewers. We're excited to see where this goes."
    - Zach Friedman,
    VP of Digital Ad Sales at FOX News Channel & FOX Business Network

    Investing for the future

    We're experimenting with additional models, like linear TV, as well. As just one example, we're running trials of addressable ads into linear TV set-top boxes via our Google Fiber service in Kansas City. Powered by DoubleClick technology, we are helping local businesses connect with customers in that market by delivering more relevant messages to viewers.

    Continuing to explore the evolution of TV
    In our ongoing DoubleClick series on the Evolution of TV, we've been discussing the risks and opportunities around 7 dynamics transforming the advertising landscape. In Part 3 in our Evolution of TV series (find the rest of the series here) we dispel the hype about programmatic TV, address the challenges, and concentrate on its promise for brand advertisers, programmers, and broadcasters.

    Download the new whitepaper from Think with Google for the in-depth story.

    Ultimately delivering addressable ads whether across TV ads served via the internet or through the set-top box is about delighting users with the best viewing experience. It's a technology that everyone in the industry can get behind. Advertisers have always wanted the customization, programmers and distributors have always wanted it to maximize the value of every impression and viewers appreciate more relevant ads. Addressable TV is a win-win-win proposition.

    Posted by Rany Ng, Director of Product Management, Video

    Posted:
    This post is part of DoubleClick's Evolution of TV series. In this series we identify the risks and opportunities around 7 dynamics transforming the advertising landscape as TV programming shifts to delivery over the Internet.

    Television advertising is big business. How big? TV ad spending in the U.S. is projected to reach almost $84 billion per year by 2018. Traditionally, many of these billions are spent during upfronts—that time of year when traditional TV networks and, increasingly, digital media companies gather to present their fall lineups and pitch marketers for ad dollars. Whatever TV inventory hasn't been sold, or is held back, is then sold in what is called the scatter market.

    While this traditional TV buying and selling model has worked well for decades, it's not without its inefficiencies. "Programmatic TV" is a likely solution that could apply digital advertising's efficiency models to improve TV advertising.

    What is "programmatic TV"?
    In this new whitepaper we explore what exactly "programmatic TV" is and its promise for those involved.

    We define "programmatic TV" as a technology-automated and data-driven method of buying and delivering ads against TV content. This includes digital TV ads served across the web, mobile devices, and connected TVs, as well as linear TV ads served across set-top boxes.

    As with any new technology, though, the programmatic TV offerings on the market today fall short of the full potential of the technology. As a result, programmatic TV skeptics have reason to ask “why change what’s not broken?” We’re here to say that, while the TV buying and selling process isn’t exactly broken, there's a role for programmatic TV to make it better.

    In Part 3 in our Evolution of TV series (find the rest of the series here) we dispel the hype about programmatic TV, address the challenges, and concentrate on its promise for brand advertisers, programmers, and broadcasters.

    Download the new whitepaper from Think with Google for the in-depth story.


    -
    Rany Ng,
    Director of Product Management, Video

    Posted:
    Cross-posted from the Google Online Security Blog

    It’s pretty tough to read the New York Times under these circumstances:

    And it’s pretty unpleasant to shop for a Nexus 6 on a search results page that looks like this:

    The browsers in the screenshots above have been infected with ‘ad injectors’. Ad injectors are programs that insert new ads, or replace existing ones, into the pages you visit while browsing the web. We’ve received more than 100,000 complaints from Chrome users about ad injection since the beginning of 2015—more than network errors, performance problems, or any other issue.

    Injectors are yet another symptom of “unwanted software”—programs that are deceptive, difficult to remove, secretly bundled with other downloads, and have other bad qualities. We’ve made several recent announcements about our work to fight unwanted software via Safe Browsing, and now we’re sharing some updates on our efforts to protect you from injectors as well.

    Unwanted ad injectors: disliked by users, advertisers, and publishers

    Unwanted ad injectors aren’t part of a healthy ads ecosystem. They’re part of an environment where bad practices hurt users, advertisers, and publishers alike.

    People don’t like ad injectors for several reasons: not only are they intrusive, but people are often tricked into installing ad injectors in the first place, via deceptive advertising, or software “bundles.” Ad injection can also be a security risk, as the recent “Superfish” incident showed.

    But, ad injectors are problematic for advertisers and publishers as well. Advertisers often don’t know their ads are being injected, which means they don’t have any idea where their ads are running. Publishers, meanwhile, aren’t being compensated for these ads, and more importantly, they unknowingly may be putting their visitors in harm’s way, via spam or malware in the injected ads.

    How Google fights unwanted ad injectors

    We have a variety of policies that either limit or entirely prohibit, ad injectors.

    In Chrome, any extension hosted in the Chrome Web Store must comply with the Developer Program Policies. These require that extensions have a narrow and easy-to-understand purpose. We don’t ban injectors altogether—if they want to, people can still choose to install injectors that clearly disclose what they do—but injectors that sneak ads into a user’s browser would certainly violate our policies. We show people familiar red warnings when they are about to download software that is deceptive, or doesn’t use the right APIs to interact with browsers.
    On the ads side, AdWords advertisers with software downloads hosted on their site, or linked to from their site, must comply with our Unwanted Software Policy. Additionally, both Google Platforms program policies and the DoubleClick Ad Exchange (AdX) Seller Program Guidelines, don’t allow programs that overlay ad space on a given site without permission of the site owner.

    To increase awareness about ad injectors and the scale of this issue, we’ll be releasing new research on May 1 that examines the ad injector ecosystem in depth. The study, conducted with researchers at University of California Berkeley, drew conclusions from more than 100 million pageviews of Google sites across Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer on various operating systems, globally. It’s not a pretty picture. Here’s a sample of the findings:
    • Ad injectors were detected on all operating systems (Mac and Windows), and web browsers (Chrome, Firefox, IE) that were included in our test.
    • More than 5% of people visiting Google sites have at least one ad injector installed. Within that group, half have at least two injectors installed, nearly one-third have at least four installed.
    • Thirty-four percent of Chrome extensions injecting ads were classified as outright malware.
    • Researchers found 192 deceptive Chrome extensions that affected 14 million users; these have since been disabled. Google now uses the techniques we used to catch these extensions to scan all new and updated extensions.
    We’re constantly working to improve our product policies to protect people online. We encourage others to do the same. We’re committed to continuing to improve this experience for Google and the web as a whole.

    Posted by Nav Jagpal, Software Engineer, Safe Browsing

    Posted:
    Cross posted from Think with Google.

    Last month at the IAB’s annual leadership meeting, viewability—a metric that shows whether an ad was actually viewed—was the topic on everyone’s mind. This is hardly a surprise. According to the “5 Factors of Viewability” research that we published in December, more than half of ads online today never even have a chance to be seen—something we can and must change. 

    As many of you know, we’ve long been advocates of the industry adopting viewability as a currency, a common metric to help both marketers and publishers improve their business results.

    And we’ve already come a long way. Forward-thinking publishers are introducing ad units designed for maximum viewability, and thousands of advertisers have taken advantage of viewability-based buying on the Google Display Network since we rolled it out last year. Brands and agencies are prioritizing viewability in their buys, and are seeing that doing so drives better results. 

    In fact, in tests we ran this month, advertisers measuring viewability based on the MRC standard for display ads with our Active View technology found that viewable ads saw conversion rates improve by as much as 50%. These viewable ads, with a minimum of 50% in view for a minimum of one second, drove a brand lift of 10.3% while non-viewable ads didn't contribute to lift at all. The business impact to buying based on the MRC standard is real.

    While we have made some progress, there is still significant work for us to do as an industry to establish viewability as a currency. The conversation has started to devolve from a collective agreement to tackle the viewability issue to debates over viewability rates and how to value viewable buys. It’s a bit like arguing over whether a recipe needs one egg or two while ignoring the fact that the oven has caught on fire. We are so close to effecting real change on this issue; let’s not lose our nerve now.

    It is imperative that we, as an industry, take three major steps:

    1. Focus on counting viewable impressions; viewability rates don’t matter

    Marketers are not saying that they want a percentage of their campaign to be seen; rather, they are saying they want to pay only for viewable impressions. In this request, viewability rates don’t matter, but the actual number of measured viewable impressions does. 

    We believe the industry needs to aspire to 100% viewability, full stop. This means buying and selling only viewable impressions. I understand this is a significant challenge, one we're working to solve on our own media properties; without a solution, however, viewable impressions cannot become a currency for the industry.

    2. Adopt a single standard for viewability

    It’s critical that our industry accepts a single viewability standard, common to all. Without that, it will be impossible to determine the true value of a viewed impression; create scale; or optimize, pace, and forecast inventory effectively. 

    Through collective discussion and analysis, our industry and the MRC worked hard to build and agree on a standard definition of viewability, one that we support. But since doing so, not all of us have supported it, with some advertisers and publishers recently suggesting new definitions. What we cannot do as an industry is resort to building around multiple standards. 

    The way to move forward now is to accept the long-discussed, hotly debated, yet proven standard set by our industry. There will be plenty of opportunities for our industry to make adjustments and updates as our understanding of viewability evolves, but we’ll never have that opportunity if we don’t collectively take this first step and establish a true currency. 

    3. Resolve discrepancies in measurement 

    Discrepancies and low measurability rates are not acceptable, yet today they exist when publishers and advertisers compare viewability vendors. To put an end to these discrepancies, we must not only adopt a common standard but also ensure a shared process and method of measurement. A liter of water is always the same regardless of who does the measurement. The same should be true for viewable impressions.

    To get here, we must integrate measurement technology directly into ad serving, with viewability data appearing directly alongside other campaign metrics, accurately reconciled for buyers and sellers.

    Looking ahead at viewability

    As a technology, viewability is still in its earliest stages; there are many exciting opportunities for us to solve collectively. For example, viewability on mobile will be crucial as consumers spend more and more time on their smartphones. Secondary engagement metrics such as viewable time and audibility (after all, video is about sight, sound, and motion) can start to offer an even fuller picture of an ad’s effectiveness. But our industry won’t get there if we’re still debating the standard itself. 

    The best technologies are those that delight their users and then just get out of the way. We’ve come to expect this, for example, in instantly mapping out a route in a new city on our phones or having lunch delivered with just a few taps. My hope is that a year from now, viewability will be a true currency—and just as expected and as simple for everyone. 

    -
    Neal Mohan, 
    Vice President of Display and Video Advertising Products